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The Windows 10 Conundrum

One of my son’s laptops recently suffered a hard drive failure. He’d been using his “roadkill” laptop for a year or so that came pre-installed with Windows 10. Until now I’ve avoided upgrading any of my machines past Windows 7 (why fix what isn’t broken) and I personally prefer Linux on my laptops for reasons.

The roadkill laptop I’d given my eldest son was a HP business machine so it wasn’t hard to slip a new WD Green SSD drive and give it a small boost in performance at the same time.

Reinstalling Window 10 was also rather simple, simply requiring creation of a USB media stick and following the bouncing ball with the license codes I had on paper.

So far so good.

However upon booting the machine I was horrified with the push to sign up for a Microsoft account to “simplify your user experience”. Ummm childs laptop, not a good idea to suck on the cool-aide and allow tracking of habits at a young age, there stills needs to be some privacy. So with the help of Google we managed to create a local account (not intuitive), which does not require internet access to login.

So now we have an account on the local machine I could see what the new UI looks like. Once again I wasn’t impressed with the standard apps installed, the bloat and blatant adverting gumph plastered on every screen. There was content waiting and ready to download as soon as you clicked on an icon, installed games and a host of stuff I wouldn’t let corporate users access too. So off they came too.

I’m going to be forever thankful to the writers at HowToGeek for there series of articles on how to disable the advertising and things like Cortana (also not what I want on my childs laptop). Below are the two articles I found most useful;